[Axiom-developer] concatenate and bit-vector

[daly]

Steve,

In order to move from MacLisp to VMLisp and then to pre-common lisp
and then to common lisp (and now to ansi) one of two possible 
approaches can be taken. The first approach is to emulate the
semantics of the original system in the new system. The second 
approach is to prove that the new system does not require all of
the old semantics.

Because it is less error-prone to take the first approach the decision
was to emulate the prior system semantics where possible. In this
particular case the concat and strconc functions have vmlisp and/or
maclisp semantics.

An example occurs in metalex.lisp where it reads:
; Coding note: yes, I know, use string-trim -- but it is broken
; in Symbolics Common Lisp for short strings.

or in parsing.lisp
"A string contining the remaining chars from readline; needed because
Symbolics read-line returns embedded newlines in a c-m-Y"

or many other places such as DEFIOSTREAM, which is non-common lisp.

I still have the MacLisp and VMLisp documentation but most people do
not.  The fact that I did not document the semantics of strconc, for
instance, is a flaw I hope we can all overcome in the present port.

Tim